last visible dog chapter 2 sneak peek

[figureofdismay]

There was a nice picturesque hotel, red brick and white fretwork and a well groomed tea garden out front with green umbrellas for tourists having coffee, where the school visitors and prospective students all stayed. Roman had been there once himself, back when Caroline was reassuring herself that she wasn’t handing him off to a completely heathanish place even though it wasn’t Eton or Harrow.

He’d been fourteen then and his parents were mostly but not yet completely divorced. Shiv, then twelve and some change, had been with them because she’d pitched a fit about not being included, and had spent the trip alternately staring at the older boys on the tour with with an embarrassing dreamy expression and loudly telling Roman how bored and miserable he was going to be at the school and how outdated everything was, and then how old and boring the hotel was, when she got left back in their rooms the next day. It was different staying there by himself though, it turned out. Quieter, emptier, though maybe that was just because it wasn’t school visiting season and there didn’t seem to be a lot of guests. The woman at the front desk had given him a hard funny speculating look when he and his sling and his school trunk had checked in, obviously not sure why he was there, but he’d given her a charming smile and handed over the platinum card, which she’d smiled at in turn. He didn’t think she recognized the name but it was hard to be sure.

He lay back on the wheat colored bedspread, and began to plan, without consciously meaning to, crabwise around the thorny problem of he was seventeen and a student and Dr. Gerri Kellman had the best set of breasts and the cutest nose and the widest blue eyes, and had starred in plenty of his jerkoff fantasies in his feverish and heady youth, especially after that time he’d fainted in biolab and had come to with Dr. Kellman’s cool, speculative face and remarkable cleavage above him, and especially when the Kellman Divorce was making campus news, giving her a spurious air of promiscuousness among the boys until they realized singleness hadn’t made her any vampier or more approachable. That she’d seen him in the swampy, miserable state he’d been in the winter of sophomore year, a gray time he barely even remembered save for a few over-clear, shaming fragments, wild, irrational fights, the steady pounding of thin, endless hunger, and the slow rising to the surface afterwards in an infirmary bed, drugged and unwinding and the feeling that Dr. Kellman was watching him put his skin back on, his walking human suit – that hadn’t made his fantasies of her any less potent, it had just added a little piquancy of cringing shame over the heat of imagining her watching him do it, maybe with that same look of disappointed pity.

He wasn’t a total idiot, he knew he had a baby face, no matter how much some of the older, more powerful boys used to like to fuck it in return for inclusion in their golden coolness, and their not beating him up for slinking up to their lunch tables or using a gym locker in their view. He knew he was short and awkward and a lesser, annoying son, not the dour, smug, neurotic, lanky Kendall the chosen one of Royco, and not the kind of nerdy genius with an angelic smile and kitschy innocence like the adults of the school tended to dote on. He didn’t really think Gerri Kellman took him seriously. But nearly smashing his brains out had clued him in to the fact that she really did care if he lived or died, or became a dribbling vegetable, and not like in the obligatory way adults cared if he lived or died, with the sword of Logan Roy litigation hanging over their heads, but in a cozier, more thrilling personal way that made her chase off his friends and scold him for not eating. Made her straighten his shirt collar before he went to see the headmaster so he wouldn’t look messy, which was like, above and beyond, he couldn’t get his head around it beyond knowing he liked it. Needed her hands fussing over him again, in any way he could swing it, and if it came with another glimpse or dozen down her blouse that would be excellent as well.

**

When he was really little, Roman was fixated on the idea of getting married. First he decided he wanted to marry Jilly Thrup because she was in charge of things like snack time and when he and Kendall had to take turns with the playroom TV, and if she was married to him she’d have to take his side and pay more attention to him than Kendall and baby Shivy. Then a little later he thought he wanted to marry Connor, because Connor was nice to him and taught him card games and smiled at him like he meant it and taught him knock knock jokes, and he could have a tantrum and Connor wouldn’t punish him or lash out, he’d get annoyed but say it was okay, he understood. Back then Roman thought being married was like having a permanently arranged friendship or partnership or something, where what you did together was hold parties and trade off annoying people to entertain for each other, and hold complicated, affectionately snarky conversations over your kids heads on the plane and at the dinner table, and maybe kiss your spouse’s cheek before going off to bed in your separate room, which had seemed like a pretty okay way to formalize and secure the friendship of his half brother who drifted nebulously in and out of his life. Connor had been going to college around that time, he later realized. Connor tried out a lot of colleges and majors for varying periods of time (he was a dabbler even then) which explained the in and out nature of his presence in the family sphere, but Roman hadn’t really followed that concept yet either. He did make the mistake of telling Kendall of his plan to marry Connor and be his wife, the wife was the coolly observant one who scolded caterers which he thought he could do better than the husband role of using a booming boisterous voice to tell off color jokes at the head of the table to win the adoration of the masses. Kendall was sevenish then and didn’t know a whole lot more about marriage and whatever than Roman did at five but he did like to pretend he did and did have the privilege of telling Roman that getting married involved more than formalized arguments and holding dinners and drinks dos, it involved sex and kissing stuff. “And you don’t want to be doing that with your brother. And really not with a boy.” Ken had told him scornfully.

“Not it doesn’t, don’t be gross,” Roman had protested, face scrunching with disgust.

“You’re such a baby,” Kendall had insisted and had bragged about watching movies with ‘screwing around’ on cable – Jilly was mostly busy with little Shiv in those days so the boys had unfettered control of the TV remote most of the time.

“Yeah but that’s dating,” Roman had argued, “Dating’s gross and kissing’s gross, I don’t wanna do any of that, I just wanna be married.”

“Don’t you know what a honeymoon is?” Kendall had said, rolling his eyes, full of the idea of his great natural wisdom of being two and a half years older, “Anyway you have to do one to get the other, and you sure as hell don’t want to do it with Connor. Don’t be disgusting, asshole.”

“You’re disgusting, asshole,” Roman had countered and then the two of them had wrestled until they got in trouble for spilling juice on the carpet, the initial subject of the argument forgotten.

His next idea about marriage, a little later still, when he’d grown up a little more, and overheard a little more, had involved the mermaid from Splash, which Kendall had also called dumb because Roman hated swimming, but at least Madison the impulsive long haired mermaid had been a more appropriate gender and familial un-relation. Madison the mermaid, the white girl-mouse with the cute accent from The Rescuers, the best friend he had in first and second grade, Rachel, because she had a whole collection of Breyer horses she let him play with up until her whole family moved to Europe when her diplomat father got a new posting. Kendall had called her his little girlfriend to annoy him into exchanging rabbit punches, but if ‘girlfriend’ just meant having someone to sit with at lunch, it wasn’t terrible. Rachel had heard Kendall call her Roman’s girlfriend at Roman’s birthday party, and all she’d done was roll her eyes at Ken and give Roman a boisterous shove saying, “you better not be telling people that, Roman Roy, you’re so weird,” which hadn’t actually been all that bad either. But they’d moved to Vienna the next January, so Roman didn’t get to find out if they’d grow up to be childhood sweethearts like in the schlocky family values evening soaps the studio churned out. Then more concretely, he wanted to marry his fourth grade art teacher, a tiny, pretty woman with soft brown curls, who wore enormous sweaters and seemed vaguely disconnected from reality, but always told him that his watercolor scribbles showed promise and had just smiled imperviously when Caroline had condescended her way through the midterm parent teacher conference. He’d known better by then to tell anyone about his monogamous thoughts about Mrs. Martins, especially because it did occur to his eleven year old brain eventually that the ‘missus’ meant she was already busy being monogamous with someone else and wouldn’t have time to wait for him. That turned out to be the last of the maybe-i’ll-marry for Roman for a long time.

Those early misunderstandings and that one argument with Kendall went half forgotten, and yet deep down Roman retained that first shocked flinching sensation at the realization that securely married people had to do all that ‘screwing around’ first to get there, the flirting and gross kissing and the trying to get in each other’s pants, that seemed like a weird kind of contest with a winner and a loser. Though he would realize before long, while watching his parents, that there were winners and losers in a marriage, too, in a weird complicated game that reset over and over, lulling the kids into a false sense of security that Logan and Caroline weren’t ever going to divorce because that would be admitting defeat.

That really should have been the death of Roman’s perverted marriage fantasies, the dream of a permanent best friend in a matching twin bed like Rob and Laura Petrie’s, who had to by law be nice to him and not ignore him, (obviously disgusting poor slob bullshit that never happened in real life among real people in the family’s world), and yet in his heart of hearts, it wasn’t. Deep down in his squirming subconscious, part of him still wanted to latch onto someone and make them sign a pact to love, honor, and not get tired of or whatever, like he was some kind of schmaltz brained suburbanite. The two things warred vaguely in the back of his mind during his long adolescence confined with the other over-sexed and under-exposed boys at Rawlings, the flinch response and the sickly hope, among their smuggled porn mags and fantasies and exchanges of particular favors – that didn’t mean anything, of course – for the sake of social commerce and pleasurable expediency. He figured he’d grow up once he got beyond those brick walls and want what the other boys wanted, and be able to shrug casually about wanting and getting lucky and moving along, that it would just happen, like his growth spurts, a little late and not that massive but still coming in at the clutch. Like a growth spurt for the blurry, squeamish hindbrain that seemed to have some wires crossed, fear and lust, fascination and revulsion that sparked and flickered in all the wrong orders about the wrong things. He was sure it was coming in just a little while.

So realizing he was attracted to Dr. Kellman, that he liked her more than the simplistic, ‘attractive person in the vicinity who wasn’t one of the fellow boys who could make his life hell’ way, and in fact in a ‘he needed her specific attention on him all the time and his extremely personal attention on her’ way gave him hope. It was a revelation and a relief. Not that he’d been afraid he was gay, exactly, though it wouldn’t have made his life as Logan’s jester youngest son any easier. The encounters, the favors exchanged with other boys had confused him more than they’d attracted him, though he liked the way the boys and their touches and their smells made his insides squirm with sexual heat and dread, he always flinched first when anyone, anyone at all reached out to touch him. He was interested in sex, obsessively hugely interested, which seemed in line with how the other boys talked, but though he could copy their words about this or that actress or model or girl from the town, it was playacting. He didn’t understand, something was missing.

He’d spent a lot of the last couple years convinced he was gay about it, that missing whatever that made the other boys want, that made them overcome that flinch he felt – or maybe they didn’t flinch at all, for all he knew. But even though he’d waited and worried, and almost hoped, he hadn’t felt that specific whatever it was for the other boys either, or any of the teachers – Mr. Sands the social studies teacher was a tall handsome young man with floppy sandy hair and bright eyes and he was the lightning rod for the adolescent crushes of the queer boys, they’d stare and get flustered no matter how badly Reed and his goons hassled them for it. Roman had remained indifferent. Roman hadn’t even developed a crush on Reed, who menaced him so familiarly and had liked to corner him in the toilets those first couple of years to see how far Roman would go to please him in order to be one of his favored few before Reed decided he liked beating Roman up better. Roman’s memory of the inciting incident was scrambled but he thought his biting had played a role there, too. Roman knew his twisted up little psyche was ripe with just the right kind of insanity where Reed could and even should have been his first great adolescent infatuation, it even would have been a relief in a kind of way. Yet he’d had no fantasies of Reed’s hands or his aesthetically pleasing face or his once-familiar cock, just a numb speculative sensation that told him it would probably feel wrong in a thrilling, sparky way but be ultimately unfulfilling and not worth the trouble. In fact the whole thing, aside from his desperately wailing libido, seemed not worth the trouble.

So this specific electric lance of interest in Doctor Kellman, the bright fizzing delight just to be near her, the way everything became a calculation about how he could steal another fleeting touch, was new and revelatory. It made the disparately spinning parts of him seem to catch and link and drive him to a previously only imagined realm of purpose and desire. It was heady and delirious and exciting that it felt absolutely necessary to pursue it, pursue her even though on paper, in bald facts, the situations was infeasible, inappropriate and objectively insane. Doctor Gerri Kellman was some big wadge of years older than him. She had only been divorced for a year or so. She was a doctor which meant she was really fucking smart and he’d perfected the art of riding the C+ to B- gutter to mediocrity. She worked at the school and he had to go there for another year and even though he’d be 18 in October she probably didn’t want to be fired for fiddling with a student. Her ex-husband was his classics teacher and had one more shot to punitively grade him, or grass on them both for whatever she allowed them to get up to. All completely unworkable, insurmountable obstacles, but even so Roman didn’t feel particularly daunted, not just because people made exceptions for Roys all the time (Roman hadn’t felt much of this but it sure happened for Pop and Kendall and Shiv), but because he’d finally cracked the code to get his head and his dick and that buzzy feeling in his chest to talk to each other and that had to be a sign he was on the right track.